Beginning with the basics

I11

I like Food not Bombs because I think that having food and...sharing food is... one of the most...basic things. If we can do that then we can do everything else...or we can work towards doing everything else for ourselves too.

Crisis and collective action

I10

I feel like there's going to be some sort of big shift, something's going to happen, maybe all the ice is going to melt in the Arctic and its going to finally make people, I hope, wake up. I think that it's sad that this is the way it is but I feel like people won't unite as a whole until something cataclysmic happens. I feel like that might be the kick in the pants our species needs.

The limits of success

I20

I think that what makes us successful is also our weakness. We are super successful at a certain kind of advocacy work and a certain kind of change work but...in some ways having a lot of credibility with government, with media, in the case of some of our campaigns with industry in fact means that we are not as open or part explicitly of wider change movements or wider justice movements. So...our success in one area limits our ability to be a real agent for wider change, so I think that's a barrier in the long term if not necessarily right now.

Talking strategically

I15

The discussion that's had around diversity of tactics is shallow. I think that we…[talk so much] about tactics that we don't ever talk about strategy and I don't necessarily think that diversity of tactics, writ large, is a strategy in itself….If I say that we accept a diversity of tactics, there [are still] obviously some tactics that [some] people support more than others and I think that we need to do better to define what we mean when we say…‘diversity of tactics’ because we never mean all tactics….[T]here's always people who think that engaging with government is selling out and there's always people who think that breaking windows is violence.

Coexistence without domination

I25

To me winning would be being able to live life without feeling like I owe something….I think it really depends on the situation. I think it's safe to say that if there were no need for prisons, no need for borders, or money, all of these sort of institutionalized methods of control, I think if you got rid of all those and just had the co-existence of people working, living together and not depleting and stripping the ecosystem in which they're placed, to me I guess that would be [winning].

Building commonality

I1

I [found] myself spending more and more of my time on issues I was seeing [around me]....I saw tenant organizing in a similar way that I see union organizing: it's a way to actually build commonality.

Turning the tide

I20

I guess what I keep hoping is that the people who are using the skills of working together, of growing food, making things, of connecting with people despite barriers and differences, that when there is an inevitable big shift in this particularly unsustainable political and economical world we live in...there will be enough of these to...turn the tide.

A liberated society

I12

I guess an anarchist society would be a society with the ability to choose your own options, and your own freedoms, and your own lifestyle without having to basically grow up with a set of options that are provided for you...by society. You have very few avenues to go [down] right now. You can either go to school, you can go to trades, you can be homeless, there are very rigid options that we're provided [with] and if you don't conform...it's a struggle.

Organizing alternatives

I9

I've [retreated] from being so action focused because I didn't see the sum of all the actions I was doing actually building anything that was creating any fighting potential to actually challenge the social conditions around me. I just felt like it was going nowhere. The cafe was different. With the cafe we were putting together a project [which] we hoped would be an example of something that was organized differently on different principles. So we were organizing on this principle called participatory economics and we were organizing as a workers’ cooperative so, as we saw it, this cafe bookstore venue was...how we were organizing a very political space that was living by example and the hope was we could encourage other people to organize like that.

Revolution and Indigenous struggles

I11

I've found stories of Indigenous resistance in Canada pretty inspiring and I'd like to know more about that history actually and be more in touch with it. As far as when people say that there's not going to be a revolution in Canada and that Canada is one of the most stable countries in the world I think that's not true in a lot of communities and I wouldn't say that's true with Indigenous people.